cheated
by Medorikoi
Summary: What can you do when one player leaves the game for good? BatmanJoker


Disclaimer: I would die to own any part of this...but seeing as i am still alive i own nothing.

Gotham took one final breath- a breath it would never have the chance to release. Time had ceased to have meaning, the grass did not grow, the breeze was still and dead air was as bitterly cold as their hearts.

Only two things carried on alive in this dead world. Pitiless, an army of clocks marched forward as their owners fearful hearts could not see past 12:00 AM October 31, 2008 and a single bowed figure that stumbled into the evil night.

He would be the first and last at the scene, as the deep distant toll of midnight resonated through Gotham he woke to the sound of his world crashing around him and the other half of his soul fading into the night.

---

It is dark- too dark, and the world is silent, all the sounds of life whooshing out of existence like the death of a flame. The endless chatter of birds, the mindless hum of people's petty lives, the crying of infants in the night- silenced. Something is wrong. Very very very wrong. No one else can feel it, no one else is awake but that means nothing. They are not like me, only one person is, only one other person could wake from this strange shift in the universe…but the only thing that could pull me from my restless slumber… is him

I steal out into the street, my men, the worthless fools, notice nothing- but the animals know better, the stilled wind knows better. It hurts; something deep within me is breaking apart, shattering and sending brittle shards into my aching flesh. This is not the dazzling light of a fist into my face, not the brilliant powerful connection of an irresistible force and an unmovable object meeting, this is one force being released alone onto the world.

The streets are empty and I find myself driving, just a car, some car, driving without thinking to the only place I have ever stayed long enough to call home. The dark towers loom in the distance before I ever see the dull rust of the iron gates. Arkham. I'm not thinking my breath is a harsh pant raking over my scarred lips, burning the fragments of my soul as my heart pumps acid into my body. He is there, my Dark Knight, my soul, my everything. Just beyond the gates. A broken laugh breaks my chest. I always knew he would end up at Arkham- in the end.

I am over the gate, my palms bleed, blood and rust mixing but I don't feel it. I don't feel anything. I cradle him in my arms but he does not move, his precious sneer is gone, the torment in his blue eyes lost in a haze of clouded death. My twin, my unstoppable force, my life is gone. I don't understand. I can't. I shake him, hit him, slap him…and then I beg. 'please? Please…PLEASE?' But he cannot hear me, the bastard. He has left me all alone, alone as he was before I came along, his dark counterpart.

A rivulet of red slips from his lips into his mask, harsh against his white skin- white like mine. And then I see it. The red is everywhere, my purple suit is stained a deep terrible crimson, only his black armor seems immune, stubbornly black, cruelly lying, pretending to help him when all it did now was hide the red that poured into the ground beneath us. A cruel lie.

I don't want to leave him here like this. I cannot leave him. I will not let the pawns we have played with take him apart piece by piece; I will not give them the satisfaction they crave in their own twisted curiosity. In life be belonged only to me and that will never change.

Together we make our way back to the car, he makes a bone chilling crack when he hits the ground on the other side of the tall gate but he does not complain. When we get back the car I cradle him close, offer the comfort we could have given each other if only the world would have left its twisted children alone! When I kiss his frozen lips, like an infant pawing at its dead mother he taste of blood and earth.

I lay him down alone and I know that I cannot leave him, not now, I cannot let him escape me so easily. He cheated our game, he broke the rules, the Batman was not allowed to die. Now that the game was over it was time to put away the pieces.

Together we traveled through Gotham, hunting, together at last. The flowers fell all around him, black for him, thorns, and violent beauty, purple for me, a splash of anarchy for the world that had no more reason. I clutched the flowers harsh against me, breaking the fragile flowers of the ones I wanted most, before I lay them to rest on his chest, the centerpiece of our collection, the Absinth and Poppy's. Separation and eternal love…and eternal sleep.

I wore a breathing mask as I covered our flowers in a fine mist, silly I know, because The Joker could not exist in a world without The Batman…but that's why I put a mask on the Bat as well.

The sun has not risen yet, nor will it ever on this cursed city. The fools, hardly alive in their mindless lives sleep still, even when their savior lays here with me at last. They will pay more dearly than they ever dreamed.

The flowers lay strewn across the cold dead earth, purple, black and green a welcome relief against the cold grey of Arkham and the terrible crimson seeping through the wet earth feet beyond. The first tribute of many.

Together we stumble to my old room, the highest room in Old Arkham, abandoned now but no more decrepit than the last official night I spent here. I place only a few choice calls and the city is on fire, a low burn that will consume them all. I cannot see the cold panic, the fear, but I can feel it rise above the city.

Halloween. A day taken over by the tedious creatures of Gotham, a night stolen by greedy hands is relinquished back to the monsters that birthed its legends. This day will not be one of treats, but a final trick for them all.

They came one by one like a stream of moths to the flame, some in respect, some in loss, and some in anger and confusion but they all came. Not a soul stirred in the empty black streets of Gotham but the black figures that emerged from their hideouts.

A crimson rose, beautiful and poisonous grew with unnatural speed out of the pool dark of blood saturating the earth; Poison Ivy blew a poison kiss to where the flower grew and was gone.

An umbrella- the figure dropping it bent and twisted, words could barely reach where they lay curled together, cold as stone now, but a grumbling reached them 'it should have been me…'

A coin joined the ranks of blood stained posies, flipped into oblivion by a man that looked only half torn over his loss, He flipped it one last time,' My gift to you- for the ferryman'. The glint of it in the moonlight the only bright thing left in Gotham. 'Heads. You should have lived.'

A whip,

A vial of poison,

A gun,

Bullets,

Bombs

Silent tributes to the ways he should have left the world, if only in the eyes of their once owners. A picture- an angry word- not matter what they abandoned in hopeless tribute they all came.

The sun had come and gone, unnoticed, unwanted. Hallows Eve approached, but the ghouls of night terrors were trapped in their own nightmares, trying to understand a world where there was no balance and all the filth of the city could run rampant, defiling the truly beautiful dark- taking their glory. The children did not long to roam the streets as fairies and demons, how do you pretend to be evil when you have no good by which to measure yourself?

The clocks marched unforgiving, and high above the city Joker wiped cold thick blood from what was once Batman's handsome cheek, his hand gently running over the cowl, shutting unseeing blue eyes for the last time. The bell tower above them was poised to chime. 11:59. Halloween was almost gone; time to send the spirits to their graves, all the brilliant forces of good and evil shut away with toll of this final bell. The clock struck and in the litter of abandoned trinkets the field of flowers glittered one final instant before all the color faded and they fell black and dead to the earth. The Joker let out a final, bitter laugh that resonated through the empty corpse of Gotham and he imagined he could hear the bodies falling to the ground as the poison reared its head, grasping their twisted hearts and sunk them to the hungry ground. The players had left their game.

___

Gotham woke the next morning, following the path of the sun through the sky like a sluggish zombie, sapped of life, a dim shadow of what it had been. No longer was there good and evil, light and dark, they were pitted into a world of endless grey. They forgot in their numbness the life they had once had. The Batman was forgotten by all but a few and the villains were forgotten by all in an upsurge of petty crime. If anyone were to look, to seek out why the light and the darkest shadows of Gotham went out that Halloween -in the highest tower of Arkham they would find only a deep black stain two people could lay on with one last card smiling its goodbye-the Joker.


End file.
